Bill Hand: New Bern: First in Detroit and in Green Bay

By Bill Hand, Sun Journal Staff

Published: Sunday, February 2, 2014 at 05:45 PM.

We are a town that is proud of “firsts.” We are the first official capital of North Carolina. We have America’s first registered nurse, the first car built in North Carolina, yadda yadda yadda… There is an actual list of New Bern “firsts” — I’ve seen it. Maybe I was the first to see it.

But here’s a first that isn’t in that list: New Bern supplied the first black football player for the Detroit Lions.

If that isn’t enough, New Bern sent the first black football player to the Green Bay Packers, too.

And if that isn’t enough, those two football players were the same guy.

His name was Bob Mann.

He was born in New Bern in 1924, the son of a doctor named William Mann.

“He was just a country doctor in a small town, and I don’t think he made a lot of money,” Bob Mann wrote in the book “Gridiron Gauntlet.”

We are a town that is proud of “firsts.” We are the first official capital of North Carolina. We have America’s first registered nurse, the first car built in North Carolina, yadda yadda yadda… There is an actual list of New Bern “firsts” — I’ve seen it. Maybe I was the first to see it.

But here’s a first that isn’t in that list: New Bern supplied the first black football player for the Detroit Lions.

If that isn’t enough, New Bern sent the first black football player to the Green Bay Packers, too.

And if that isn’t enough, those two football players were the same guy.

His name was Bob Mann.

He was born in New Bern in 1924, the son of a doctor named William Mann.

“He was just a country doctor in a small town, and I don’t think he made a lot of money,” Bob Mann wrote in the book “Gridiron Gauntlet.”

He attended J.T. Barber School and participated in the limited sports venues that such a school offered during segregation.

“Being in the city was not as bad as, say, Mississippi, but it was not good,” he wrote about New Bern’s segregation. “You couldn’t eat here and you couldn’t go there, but it wasn’t as bad as places further south.

“You might get in a neighborhood and get chased out, but it was such a segregated place, it didn’t happen much. One side was black, one side was white, and we didn’t have much intermingling.

“We had a separate but unequal school,” he noted, and while he felt he had more talent at baseball, it was football that he played in high school. The colored school had no basketball court or even a paved outdoor court; it had no facilities for track or baseball.

And the team, of course, played only black teams from other cities.

Mann played in 1941 at the all-black Hampton Institute in Virginia, the same college his brother and sister attended.

“Somebody asked me once since I was from North Carolina, why didn’t I go to Duke,” Mann wrote later. “I told them I couldn’t even breathe, they made me stop breathing when I went past Duke. There were a bunch of good athletes that got passed up by the white schools.”

His father, hoping Bob would pursue a medical career, arranged for him to get into the University of Michigan where, for the first time in his life, he was playing with whites. By his own words, he spent easy games on the bench, but was put in when games got tough — “The coach, Fritz Crisler, was not dumb… he knew if he wanted to win, his chances were better if he let me play, so whatever his prejudices were, if any, he put them aside.”

Mann stated the white players on his team showed no prejudice, though he couldn’t say as much as the local town, Ann Arbor, Mich., where, even in the north, many restaurants were closed to blacks.

Mann joined his first professional team — the Detroit Lions — in 1948, as an end. He had a good year, considering he was not a starter. But in 1949, he excelled, leading the NFL in receiving yards (1,014) and yards per catch (15.4). But in 1950, he was asked to take a 20 percent pay cut and he refused.

From what I can tell, that pay cut issue was created not so much by prejudice as it was a mixture of a recent merger of the NFL and the AAFL (All-America Football Conference) and a rather convoluted snafu regarding his relationship as a spokesman for the Goebel beer company that I won’t even attempt to go into.

He was traded to the New York Yankees, an AAFL team — but the coaches there told him he was too small to make the roster.

For about four months, he was a man without a football team, but in November 1950, he signed on as the first black player with Green Bay as a wide receiver. He was practically the first black man in Green Bay, period.

“There were two black males in the whole city,” he wrote, “three including me. One worked for the railroad… and the other one was a porter.” He added that the city boasted no black women at all.

He was a leading player on the team until 1954, when a knee injury forced him out.

Mann spent most of the rest of his life as a lawyer in Detroit. In 1988, he was inducted into the Packers Hall of Fame. He died in 2006.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote at the time of his death that Mann “pioneered the idea that skin color does not limit talents.”